Lost and found

Did you worry that your readers wouldn't be able to handle the tragedies and the violence of this story?

D.E.: We actually had to lighten it up a little bit. We left out a lot of different episodes: another lion attack, more experiences with land mines, an encounter with a lone militiaman. If it's strict nonfiction, it's a bit too much, so we actually had to brighten the corners a little bit, and look for some of the happier moments, and reduce some of the things that would make it too unbelievably sad. It was strange to have to do that.

The novel begins with Valentino being held hostage at gunpoint in his apartment in Atlanta. As tragic as life in Africa was, life in America for the Lost Boys seems to be far from idyllic.

D.E.: I think that a lot of the guys came here with really high hopes and expectations: This is a country that's for the most part peaceful, it's prosperous, certainly we'll be taken care of, we'll go to college, we'll have degrees in a few years and then have great-paying jobs. Well, that falls apart right away when they realize that they have three months of aid and then they're on their own.

The vast majority of guys had to get low-paying jobs right away. How do you go to college or prepare for college when you're working 40 to 60 hours a week at $8 an hour? Even in Val's case, as an acknowledged leader of all these guys, it took five years even to be able to get into a college.

What was it like for you, psychologically, to take on Valentino's story?

D.E.: Well, I think the very matter-of-fact way that Val tells it helped me ingest it in a matter-of-fact way. You have to totally suspend your normal assumptions about life on earth, basically.

After hearing a story like that, you mean?

D.E.: Yeah. As we kept recovering things, more would come out. Even very late in the process, Val was still leaving out the most incredible parts. At one point, while we were covering the part of his life when he was at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, he mentioned that he had once attempted to leave the camp, so he could return under a new name. This was a way of getting an extra ration card, and thus more food. So we were talking about this "recycling" trip for a while, and I thought we had all the details, and I had written it all out. Then one day I asked, "How did you get back to Sudan, by the way?" And he said. "Oh, you know, well, I was on a truck full of corpses." And it was a detail he'd just, like, thrown away.

But that was one of the things I thought, "No, no, this can't be true," because it seems fictional. Could there really be a truck full of corpses and half-dead people on their way back to Southern Sudan to be buried there? Well, of course this did happen, and it was corroborated by other reports that said that the drivers of such trucks wouldn't bury the bodies, they would just dump them wherever they could and use the truck to transport people -- you know, living people who could pay a fare -- back into the country.

So I think you actually just have to close your aperture a little bit in terms of your own empathy. You can be as empathetic as you can possibly be, which I hope I was, but at the same time your senses are dulled. Just as aid workers' senses are dulled, or doctors', or whoever sees a lot of blood and calamity.

Valentino, is it traumatic for you to go back and remember these things -- being a child driven from your village, or walking for months as other children died around you, or watching the SPLA execute a group of prisoners? Do you put that in a part of your mind that you just normally don't go back to?

V.A.D.: I think my age at the time helped me to endure what happened. I wasn't old enough to take some things as an abuse of my rights and victimization. I was still young, below 15 or 14 years old. So something that happened, I simply discarded it a few days later. We were all boys and then teenagers, so when there was time for happiness, we were happy. We don't talk about the past because we assume that everybody saw it. It is not a new story for us. And why would somebody in our group take on what had happened in the past, if it would limit his talents or his abilities to persist and be well?

But now that I am older, I can revisit what happened. I want to use those stories to correct the future -- to make sure it doesn't happen to other children in the future.

Dave, how does your experience now with Sudan and the people of Southern Sudan influence the way you react to the situation in Darfur?

D.E.: I have all kinds of feelings. We know that it's the same guys, the same militias that attacked Southern Sudan who are now working in Darfur. In many cases, it's the same guys exactly, just with a different name. They're called murahaleen in the south and Janjaweed in the west. They're using the exact same tactics, surrounding a town, marauding, raping, pillaging, abducting, poisoning the wells, and burning the place to the ground. To see it happening again and again is infuriating, and the apathy is infuriating -- or at least the inaction.

When we went to Sudan, Darfur was just starting to unravel. The weirdest thing is that now, when you see newspaper articles and pictures of Darfur, you think it's just desolation. All you see is these vast expanses of nothing, or you see emaciated children in refugee camps, or a mother who has lost her child, and the grim black-and-white pictures meant to make clear how horrible it is.

I think that people need to know that this isn't just par for the course for this part of the world. As Westerners, we can say, well, look, it's a wasteland to begin with and these people have been killing each other for hundreds of years. I think that's what Khartoum wants us to believe -- oh, it's just tribal skirmishes.

But when we went to Marial Bai, it was an active, bustling village with a marketplace and songs and families and church, and everything that makes up a life, every aspect of humanity as we know it -- here or anywhere else. It was a living place, in part because the U.S. had stepped in and brokered a cease-fire between the north and the south. It was still rebuilding -- there were ruins everywhere of the village's former homes and municipal buildings -- but there was stability. And things are getting better in Southern Sudan all the time. When we went there, there wasn't one telephone; now there are cellphones owned by individuals. I guess my point is that in the West our perceptions of Africa are sometimes skewed, and we forget everything we take for granted about normal daily life is at stake in Darfur. A normal life is possible for the people of Darfur if the U.S. steps up and insists that Khartoum put a stop to the genocide.

Next page: Valentino was held at gunpoint, and the Atlanta police gave him a little business card that said "Citizen Complaint"